S.F. November ballot - soda tax, Muni, minimum wage, more

While the United States has regained 8.7 million jobs, Americans are making less on average.

While the United States has regained 8.7 million jobs, Americans...

(08-12) 07:08 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco's November ballot has been finalized, and it's a doozy.

City voters will weigh in on six state measures, 12 local measures and as many as 20 races, depending on where they live. And most of the issues aren't exactly easy to understand.

The city's ballot alone will ask voters to decide on a $500 million transportation bond, a boost to Muni funding, a tax on sodas and other sugary drinks, a minimum wage increase, and whether soccer fields at the western end of Golden Gate Park should be covered with synthetic turf.

Here's a quick roundup of the local measures that qualified as listed by the Department of Elections:

Residents in Districts 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 will be asked to decide who should represent them at the Board of Supervisors over the next four years. And many San Francisco voters will be asked to decide between sending Supervisors David Chiu or David Campos to the state Assembly.

So, get ready for some stuffed mail boxes and busy airwaves. There won't be any way to escape this election season.

- Marisa Lagos

Have and have-nots: The United States has bounced back from the recession, regaining 8.7 million jobs - but Americans are making, on average, 23 percent less at those jobs than they were before the downturn, according to a report released Monday.

In San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, the disparities aren't nearly as pronounced as in some Southern cities, where more than half of residents are making less than $35,000 a year. But 18 percent of households in San Francisco and the Oakland/Fremont areas make under $25,000 a year, while nearly one-quarter bring home less than $35,000 annually. Neither amount is enough to live comfortably in a San Francisco - where the median price of a home hit $1 million this summer - but the city's median income did jump by nearly $10,000 between 2005 and 2012 to about $75,000.

Meanwhile, nearly 50 percent of San Francisco households make $75,000 a year or more. And the city's southern neighbor, San Jose, has among the largest percentage of households in the nation - about 57 percent - bringing home that much. About a quarter of households in the entire region make between $35,000 and $75,000.

The report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors examined income disparities over the past four decades and found that the problem has gotten steadily worse. Nationally, the highest-earning 20 percent of households saw their share of income rise by about 8 percent between 1975 and 2012 - with the biggest gains among the top 5 percent of wage earners. Those numbers were even more striking in recent years, with the highest 20 percent of households capturing more than 60 percent of total income gains between 2005 and 2012.

Meanwhile, the lowest wage earners "experienced a declining share of income since 1975."

For example, the average annual wage of jobs lost between 2008 and 2009 was $61,637, while the average wage in new jobs in 2014 was $47,171.

"The income distribution has been shifting to upper income households for at least the last generation, and the recession has exacerbated it," said Jim Diffley, the report's author.

The median household income in Silicon Valley is projected to grow more than anywhere else in the nation between 2013 and 2017, by 4.6 percent. San Francisco and the East Bay are also expected to see healthy growth of nearly 4 percent during that period.